Chapter 4
JOHNNY
Here’s what I know about myself so far: I like sarcasm, I can’t stop staring at the woman who pulled me off a beach, and one plate of stir fry has me ready to pass out like a goddamn toddler after Thanksgiving dinner.
Pathetic. Truly.
But it’s not really the exhaustion that’s bothering me.
It’s that moment at the sink. Natalia’s hand under mine, the glass between us, and every nerve in my body lit up like I’d grabbed a live wire.
Three seconds, maybe. Then her phone buzzed, and whatever invisible wire had been pulling us together snapped, and she walked straight to her bedroom without looking back.
Goodnight, Johnny.
I wanted to follow her. Which is insane. I don’t know my own name and I’m ready to chase a woman down a hallway because she touched my hand over a wet glass?
It’s not just that she’s beautiful, even though she is—distractingly, annoyingly beautiful. It’s that being near her feels like remembering something. Like my brain is trying to hand me a file it can’t quite reach.
A breeze carries salt air through the cracked window, and the waves outside keep their steady rhythm, that endless drag of water on sand that makes your eyelids heavy whether you want them to or not. I’m out before I can finish the thought that maybe I should…
The gun goes off so close to my face that I feel the heat of it.
I’m upright in the bed before my eyes open, legs tangled in sheets, gasping like I just broke the surface of deep water. My skin is soaked. Not damp. Soaked, like someone dumped a glass of water over me while I slept.
The dream won’t let go.
I was fighting someone. A man, big, face smeared and indistinct like a photograph left in the rain.
I was losing. My ribs screamed, my mouth tasted like copper, and every time I tried to stand, my legs buckled.
Then another figure came in. This one felt different, and dream-me trusted him without a single second of doubt.
He hauled me up. I turned. And I put a bullet between the other man’s eyes.
I watched him fall. I watched him die. And what crawls under my skin now, what’s making my hands shake and my teeth clench, isn’t that I killed someone in that dream.
It’s that I felt good about it.
The room is doing something it shouldn’t be doing.
The walls are breathing. The moonlight from the window is wrong, too bright, stretching shadows into shapes that don’t match the furniture.
I know I’m in Natalia’s guest room. I know I’m in the Outer Banks.
But my body is still back in that fight, muscles locked, fists tight, still running on the adrenaline of violence, and the disconnect between here and there makes the room feel like it’s tilting under my feet.
Bathroom. I need the bathroom.
I make it there on legs that feel borrowed.
Cooler air hits my bare chest, and I grasp the edges of the sink, forcing my head down.
I crank the faucet as I shove my face under it.
Water hits my skin and my brain shorts out because suddenly it’s not water, it’s blood, warm and thick and seeping into places you can’t reach, and I know what that’s like.
Not in theory.
In my hands. Under my fingernails. On my face while I’m breathing hard and someone else isn’t breathing at all.
“Fuck.” I grip the porcelain until my knuckles go white. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Back in the room. Pacing. Window to door, door to window.
The hardwood is cool and gritty with tracked-in sand under my bare feet.
My lungs won’t open all the way. Every breath feels like sucking air through a wet rag and I know, clinically, that this is a panic response, adrenaline and cortisol and my nervous system overreacting.
Yet knowing that helps exactly zero percent.
Four steps to the window. Four steps to the door.
“Are you okay?”
I stop mid-stride.
Natalia’s in the doorway. Hallway light behind her soft and yellow. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt that stops at mid-thigh, and her hair is wrecked from sleep, chestnut tangles falling across one shoulder. She looks—
Okay, no. I’m not doing that right now.
I’m in the middle of a psychological meltdown about the fact that I might be a murderer.
This is not the time to notice that her legs go on for approximately forever, or that the shirt is slipping off one shoulder.
I notice all of it anyway, because apparently my brain has priorities and they’re fucked.
“Peachy.” I tell her. “Never better. Just doing some light cardio at three in the morning. Really committed to the routine.”
She ignores that completely. Just walks across the room, calm and steady, no hesitation, like approaching a man who’s pacing and shaking and shirtless and sweating is something she’s got experience with. That thought snags somewhere in my head. Files itself away.
She takes my hand. Her fingers are cool and dry and sure, and she leads me to the edge of the bed and sits me down.
“Look at me.” She holds my eyes and takes a slow breath. In through her nose, measured, counted. Out through her mouth. “Match me.”
My first attempt sounds like a death rattle.
“Again.” No frustration. Just steady. “Breathe into your belly, not your chest. Let your diaphragm do the work.”
She puts her hand flat on my sternum. Palm over my heart. Warm and steady against bare skin, and the contact is so grounding that my heart rate starts to settle before I even take the next breath.
I breathe. Match her. In, out. In, out.
Slowly, the vise around my ribs loosens. The walls stop their slow inhale. My hands unclench.
We stay like that. I don’t know how long.
Just our breathing and the waves outside and the occasional creak of the house settling.
Her hand rises and falls with my chest, and I can’t ignore how near she is.
The warmth coming off her skin. The smell of her, which isn’t perfume but clean cotton and salt air and something underneath that’s just her.
The way the moonlight catches the curve of her cheek.
I should not be thinking about any of this. I am thinking about all of it.
“Are you sure I don’t know you?”
My hand is already moving before I can stop it, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. My fingers graze her cheek and stay there, and she’s not pulling away. Her skin is so soft it makes me stupid.
“No.” Barely a whisper. “Why?”
“Because nothing in my head makes sense except you. Everything’s static and broken and wrong, and then you show up and it all just...” I trail off. Breathe. “Maybe I just want to know you. Maybe that’s all it is.”
Something shifts in her face. A crack in the composure. And then it seals over, fast, and she’s off the bed and across the room before I can register the loss of her hand.
“You can’t say things like that.” Arms crossed. Chin up. Five feet of distance that feels like fifty. “What if you have someone? A girlfriend, a wife? You have no idea, Johnny. You could be hurting someone right now and you wouldn’t even know it.”
The smart move is to agree. Be the reasonable, responsible guy with a head injury. But the idea of having someone, of belonging to a person who isn’t here, doesn’t land anywhere inside me. It bounces off like a stone hitting glass.
“Sure,” I say instead. “You’re probably right. I’ve definitely got a wife and two-point-five kids and a Labrador named Biscuit. Real white-picket-fence situation. That’s clearly who I am.”
She stares at me. I stare back. The joke hangs between us, but it’s not funny and we both know it’s not funny and it’s doing the job anyway, which is keeping me from saying what I actually want to say.
Please don’t leave this room.
“Get some rest.” She hesitates in the doorway. Her throat works around a swallow I can see from here. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
I’m not sure she believes it any more than I do.
Without another word she’s gone, and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, shirtless, smelling like sweat and panic, staring at empty space that still holds the ghost of her warmth.
I should sleep.
I don’t.
I stare out the window instead. The ocean is calm tonight. Flat. Silver under the moon. Nothing like—
It comes without warning. Not like the nightmare, which felt like a door kicked open. This is a window sliding up, slow and silent, and I’m looking through it before I can decide if I want to.
A storm. Lightning fracturing a sky the color of a bruise. I’m on a sailboat, bucking against waves that have no business being this tall. My hands are locked on the rigging and the salt is in my eyes. Moratoc Island. I’m close. I know I’m almost there.
The mast groans. Cracks. Falls toward me in a slow, terrible arc.
Impact. Cold so total it whites out everything.
Then water. Black and churning, in my mouth, my lungs, and my arms are fighting on nothing but animal reflex, dragging me toward shore, toward the shape of a house on the bluff lit up against the storm.
This house. Her house.
The memory lets go and I’m back. Sitting on the bed.
I was coming here. To this house. To her.
Cold threads its way down my spine, vertebra by vertebra. Deeper than panic, deeper than fear. Like a frequency running through me just shifted, and everything that was almost making sense a second ago is now off by one note.
Bone-deep wrong. The kind of wrong you can’t argue your way out of.
Whatever I was doing on that boat, whatever reason I had for pointing myself at this island, I’m not going to tell Natalia about it. Not tonight. Not until I understand what it means.
I lie back. The ceiling stares down at me, blank and unhelpful. Outside, the waves keep their rhythm. In, out. In, out.
I close my eyes and wait for whatever comes next.
I’m starting to think I’m not going to like it.